Is President Harris God's Plan?

One issue that seems neglected in the current Church, although it might be linked to inadequate catechesis on my part, is how Christians ought deal with government tyranny. 

In a way I realize I’m rather late to recognition of injustice. Millions of babies in the womb killed over the past decades asserts to the fact. Yet many people, like myself, have believed in the goodness of America and have been thrown off-kilter by recent events that threaten freedom of speech, religion, that undermine the rule of law and our justice system. Adam Smith said, “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation,” but how much is too much ruin? How much corruption is acceptable? 

Particularly appalling is the injustice around non-violent offenders related to January 6th. This is such a visible affront that affects the lives of over 1,180 defendants and the lack of outrage is offensive, whether it comes from Democrats or comfortable country club Republicans. 

I sometimes wonder if virtue *has* to be the loser in the short and medium run, and winner only in the long run.  Evil has the benefit of no guardrails as well as the element of surprise. The Soviet Union thrived for some 70 years before dismantling.  Plus I read in an older catechism that bad leaders are sometimes sent by God to chastise a people — in which case it’s possible that President Harris is God’s plan! 

Equally confusing are such disparate Christian approaches to recent tyrannies. St Maximilian Kolbe’s view seems to have been the polar opposite of Alexander Solzenheitzen's, based on the latter's haunting quote: "And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive…?…They would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation… We purely and simply deserved everything that happened.” Similarly there’s the example of Bonhoeffer in Germany. 

I read an interesting book called “Why All People Suffer”. The relevant and potent chapter was about non-violence and how the victims must show the victimizers what they are doing in order to provoke their conscience. God allows suffering as a third way to get sinners to change (the first two being their own conscience and the punishment that results from bad actions). Jesus was the premiere example of this. 

I think of this especially in regard to the "tale of two J6rs". One fled the country and received asylum from Belarus (to Belarus's credit, given the J6r would not have received a fair trial here) and another, named John Strand, who stayed and fought the charges and ended up getting a longer sentence by not lying and taking a plea deal.  

As much as I cheer and cherish the little guy who evaded the police state by fleeing (a David v. Goliath story, although this David was not nearly as good as David and Goliath surely not as nasty as our Goliath), I realize that in Christian terms Strand chose the better path. He *showed* the victimizers what they were doing and pricked the consciences of those who still have one. The other fellow did nothing productive in terms of the spiritual realm.

Are these two J6rs are, in a microcosm, the difference between Solzenheitzen's approach and St Maximilian Kolbe's? Or is the idea that one solution fits all wrong in itself and that different souls will discern differently but no less accurately? 

A Shocking Stat

Today I think I heard the most shocking statistic I’ve heard in my lifetime.  At my own parish no less. In his homily Fr. J mentioned they had a diocesan meeting for all priests yesterday and that Bishop Fernandes says that the number of Catholics in the Columbus diocese since he became bishop in 2022 has gone up 60%. Sixty percent. 

It has nothing to do with conversions of course but to Biden’s mass immigration policy.  Per Fr J, the bishop is desperately seeking foreign priests to serve the new populations, and indeed he just got one from Cameroon to serve the burgeoning Cameroon population in the diocese. 

Back of envelope math while walking the dogs: that would mean the diocese went from around 250k Catholics to 400k, a 150k influx. If there are 3 million people total pop of diocese (including non-Catholics), that means about 6% migrants added (assuming 80% are Catholic). If Biden has let in 21 million in 2 years that is about 6% of US population so it tracks. Wow. 

So welcome to Mexico! We may end up making America a more nominally  “Catholic” (or Muslim) country at the expense of our freedoms, rule of law, and safeguards we traditionally enjoyed. (Although admittedly white Democrats in power and our “educators” are doing a good job on their own with that.)

Catholic author John Zmirak says not to count on these Catholics to stay. “Virtually all the sheep our shepherds steal from other flocks leave after a few years of vapid sermons by lavender priests. The only bright side? When Catholic immigrants leave the Church, they often become conservative evangelicals and vote pro-life finally.”

History may look back and say that the stolen 2020 election was far more impactful than 2024 election because of the Biden admin's goal of making the US less a country and more a global village. For good or ill we’re different now. 

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Trump’s election in 2016 so enraged and emboldened the Deep State and Democrats that you have to wonder if MAGA was a net positive good, that maybe we shouldn’t have riled up the hornet’s nest. But who could possibly have known in 2016 that the true powers in this country are the CIA/DHS/DOJ, or that the Dems would react so strongly they would become lawless?

Hiring Trump in '16 was like giving the finger to somebody in traffic and that driver goes into road rage creates a 50-car pileup and closes the highway. You can blame the driver for the middle finger but really the other driver is at fault. 

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The amazing thing about Obama is how quickly he understood where the power centers were in the US government (I assume due to mentoring by his endorser Ted Kennedy?). Obama was as unknown and new as Jimmy Carter but turned out to be the opposite of the naive Carter by understanding the rules: the president feeds the hand of the military and intel agencies and they let him stay in power.  Thus Obama pissed a lot of liberals off when he began the drone program and killing people in foreign lands.  I recall it being pretty controversial at the time but it was surely a crucial step in securing the neocons in the agencies. He later did the coup in Ukraine and got involved in Syria and Libya. Obama also was smart about putting his generals (like the infamous Gen Milley) in power. 

If the four most charismatic presidents since JFK are Reagan, Clinton, Obama, and Trump, then the problem is that Reagan was “handicapped” by his own virtue, Trump by his enemies, and Clinton and Obama were mostly free to do as they please, unaffected by conscience or guardrail.  

Which actually is the way it has to be. Virtue has to be the loser in the short run and winner only in the long run since vice has not only the element of surprise (like Pearl Harbor) but the lack of conscience needed to do wrong. You have to have the cross before the resurrection, so evil thrives before virtue triumphs. The Soviet Union thrived for some 70 years before dismantling. Similarly the Democrats will certainly thrive before they fall. 

The Long Wait for People to Wake Up

A big part of the reason for our country's decline is that good people are actively voting for decline. My brother-in-law comes to mind, but also a second cousin who was a longtime union rep and devout Catholic.  I looked for a glimmer of hope today to see if maybe he's been able to see that what used to be called Republican (endless wars, Wall Street worship, selling out to China, etc...) is now Democratic, and what used to be Democrat (pro-American worker, anti-open border, pro speech & civil liberties) is now Republican. There’s been a pretty dramatic shift, which is why folks like RFK Jr, Tulsi Gabbard, Naomi Wolf and others have jumped on the Trump train while folks like Dick and Liz Cheney and Bush intel officials have endorsed Kamala. 

It’s not until good people figure things out that times will change and maybe it’s donning on Don, who used to be a prolific donor to the Democrat party but slowed down during the Trump era. He was an enthusiastic donor from 2006-2012 but then his wallet went silent from 2016 till his last donation in 2020 to a local county hack.  But maybe something happened over the past four years to change his mind. We’ve certainly had a lot of “new data” in the form of the Biden administration. 

It’s been an agonizingly slow process, this realignment, this period of folks calculating “are things bad enough for me to at least look at MAGA?”. It feels like it’s a race to see if America can be destroyed before good people wake up in time to keep that from happening. Given the giant increase in illegals who have no culture around rule of law or civil liberties it seems that it’s already too late by all natural appearances. And the destruction would certainly be merited. No one could possibly fault God for not saving America given how blind we’ve become, though we can always hope!  

In the end I suppose all the looking for causes of this or that, of when and how things went astray, are a waste of time. This quote from USSR dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn says it all: 

“I have spent well-nigh fifty years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.”

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There's a local priest on Facebook who still hasn't got the message. 

He's still in the Jonah Goldberg wing of the Republican Party and it's a bit befuddling. Catholics who are well-informed politically and still don't get it are fascinating, like unicorns. I might attribute it to ignorance or classism (he's a polyglot and composer and Trump's is an imperfect vessel to put it mildly) but ultimately only experience teaches, and he's got a day job and he will be won over only if things get bad enough. 

No good can come except through suffering. Isn't that the message of the cross? 

The most amazing part is how devout, smart people don’t care about their own countrymen who are suffering from unjust political persecution. I feel like I’m missing something bigly. I feel like there needs to be interviews with respectable conservative journos - honest, non-aggressive interviews - so we can understand where they’re coming from.  I joke that Jonah Goldberg would be leading the charge for the defense of the J6rs if they were protesting for free trade rather than on their perception of a stolen election. Specifically be great to sit down with the National Review gang. They've been awol. 

People just don’t seem to care about J6 and government overreach. Given my own sinfulness, it doesn’t make sense that I could be more sympathetic to their plight given that such a relatively small number of Americans care about them. I suppose part of the problem is that most of us are one-eye’d people now - we don’t read anything besides our own side. I can’t stomach reading the New York Times nor can folks who read The NY Times stomach a Tucker Carlson or Julie Kelly. 

Ultimately I suppose it comes down to the mainstream media. I understood intuitively that as America forgot God it would greatly affect the quality of politicians (as well as the quality of the voters). But for some reason I never anticipated it would kill the journalism profession.

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Heard a riveting podcast about the HB6 Ohio House scandal. Householder needed money not for yachts or personal use, but in order to collect power. One of the more discouraging elements in politics is the success of money (ads, endorsements) in the majority of political races. At least in George Washington's day votes were bought by something of actual value (whiskey). Nowadays politicians spend that money on silly commercials and the voters get nothing but empty promises. Let's go back to providing free whiskey! 

OSU, Notre Dame, the Debate

My tendency to reflexively root for the underdog is undermining my ability to be a fan of OSU and Notre Dame!  When OSU beat some patsy last week by a lopsided score I was found myself accidentally cheering when the other team made yardage.  Similarly the Northern Illinois v ND game was inspiring and so memorable, especially when the coach for Northern Illinois started crying during the interview. 

I think it’s in the American psyche to root for the underdog which is why to some extent Trump is so popular. He has everything going against him - including himself given some of his tendencies! - and yet somehow won the biggest upset of all time in 2016. But I didn't root for him then. 

Say what you will about Trump’s flaws but It's interesting that all the worldly powers of our time: the wealthy, the powerful, the government intel agents who lied about the Biden laptop, the principalities & powers like the New York Times and Washington Posts, all approve of the Jonah Goldbergs and the David Frenchs and the establishment Republicans.  Sometimes the anawim are right.

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Watched the debate the other night, ninety minutes I’ll never get back. Harris acquitted herself well enough but that isn’t too surprising given she’s a lawyer and lacks dementia.  The debate wasn’t for me or the average Americans since the average American has made up his/her mind who they will vote for. This was only about reaching that sliver of undecided in 6-7 states, approximately 250,000 people.  Hence Trump going for the Haitians eating cat in Springfield angle. This was the touchy-feely issue he needed to reach low information voters. He got rapped on the knuckles by the hall monitor but it was interesting to hear the moderator appeal to authority, saying “we reached out to the city manager about that..”.  In other words, journalists uncritically accept what a politician says. That minor thing, in a nutshell, is the problem today, the death of journalism combined with authority figures having proved themselves untrustworthy. 

Living in SoCal

I can now say I've lived in Southern California. 

Because that's what it's been like here in Central Ohio for past 2-3 months. No rain, no clouds, just stellar day after stellar day. 

I did a glorious rural run along Creek Rd at the Madison County line. Beautiful area that would be great to bike sometime. The landscape color here reminds me of San Simeon with sand-colored grasslands and golden corn stalks. It's desert country of late, the air dry and cracklin', the creeks low. The only clouds are contrails and the sycamore limbs are white as white caps, as stark as elk horns. 

The water is calm, like Walden Pond, and I slide effortlessly over the shiny surface.  It reminds me of the cover of the Thoreau classic that I treasured in grade school. I see some turkey vultures overhead and think, "Ask not for whom the turkey vultures circle, they circle for you."

Not long ago we rented a cabin outside Hocking Hills. That morning under the speckled sun I read Scripture and felt like Billy Graham on his North Carolina front porch. 

Glancing blows of sunlight 

Trunk'd pillars cathedral our path...

We started out in the family room reading amid the light knotty pine boards. Is there something evolutionary or atavistic about wood and stone in housing? Calming and natural. It feels almost western out here, like you’re transported to pony express times with ranches in the middle of nowhere. 

E-biked over hill and dale (and even the battery couldn't conquer some of those hollers). Beautiful country and really the only way to see it given it’s un-hikeable unless you’re young. Lovely to ride in the dappled shade on our “private” fifteen mile mountain road (I saw two cars the whole ninety minutes).  Even went off on an unmarked road which led to three or four houses spread out over the next half-mile. Half-surprised I didn’t get chased by a dog or a gun-owner. Again the feel was so “ranch-y’ that it felt like Ronald Reagan on his Rancho del Cielo. 

It’s a jungle out there, literally. The brush behind the house is so heavy and the climb so arduous that I assume little of this surrounding area has been hiked whatsoever either now or in previous generations when Indians and pioneers stuck to the game trails. 

There are trees so straight here that they seem to defy the laws of nature, as if they were made by machine. They silently mock the other twisted trunks, or perhaps they simply piously bear witness, ala the saints. 

It feels so oddly restorative, being in this forest womb with absolute quiet. As a retiree, how would I really notice the difference?  And yet I do...Picturesque dog walks without the need to pick up the poop or cross busy streets or force the leash over mailboxes. No need to drive the car.  It’s kind of like a beach vacation in some ways, but much less crowded. I can see why monks like the Trappists in Kentucky chose wilderness areas. You feel closer to God and have fewer distractions and attractions. You can get in a meditative mood and just sit and let whatever thoughts present themselves. 

We had fire-cooked hotdogs for dinner along with a broccoli salad that Steph made yesterday, Put gouda cheese on the dogs and declared it good! 

I took another half-mile at dusk with one of the dogs. Good to see the path in all its diurnal incarnations. Back home I notice the fire smoke rising like incense and wonder why I appreciate this sight more than the incense rising at Mass. Anyhow it's nice to make the world a better place, i.e. warmer one, by burning carbons. Longer growing seasons and all.